Sports

Signing up for double duty

By Matthew Semisch

07/29/2014

Although Dakota College at Bottineau (DCB) isn’t an alien entity to Brandon Colvin, he is entering what for him is uncharted territory.

And that’s for more than just that he’s starting life with the Lumberjacks like many of his players do: At the dorms.

On July 11, Colvin completed the paperwork that confirmed his hiring as DCB’s new men’s basketball coach and athletic director. The Waverly, Ill., native was picked to take over for former Lumberjacks men’s hoops coach Cory Fehringer and athletic director Scott Johnson.

Fehringer was named the new men’s basketball coach at Williston State on May 22. Johnson resigned from the DCB athletic director role on June 30, but he is staying at the college in his other previous position as a professor of mathematics.

With both Fehringer and Johnson leaving their posts with the Lumberjacks and Ladyjacks - Fehringer also coached DCB’s women’s volleyball team - the school had multiple spots open that it needed to fill.

Former Ladyjack student-athlete Allison Scherr was brought in in late May to take over DCB’s softball and volleyball teams.

Former head softball coach Mike Getzloff stepped down from that position in May, but he will stay on to coach the team during its exhibition season this fall.

At any rate, a new men’s basketball coach and a new AD were still needed. With that in mind, DCB decided that whichever candidate won out would take on both of those roles.

That candidate, the school decided earlier this month, was Colvin.

Before filling DCB’s athletic department’s two remaining vacancies, Colvin had most recently been the head men’s basketball coach at Minnesota State Community and Technical College (MSCTC).

Prior to that, he coached basketball teams in Qatar, Denmark and Bahrain between 2009 and 2012.

“It had always been on my wish list to coach overseas,” Colvin said. “I think that desire espspecially made itself known to me when I was at Science and I would go up to Canada every now and again.”

“Eventually, I decided it was time to put what I wanted to do into action. I went to Qatar and coached the national team for a little over two years and then to Denmark and then Bahrain and then back home. It was good, though. It was a fun opportunity out there.”

Before shaping young hoopsters talents overseas, Colvin served as an assistant men’s basketball coach at the North Dakota State College of Science (NDSCS) in Wahpeton. It was at NDSCS, Colvin said, that he first became aware of what DCB had to offer.
“I’ve moved around quite a bit,” Colvin said, putting it more than a little lightly. “But I’m very familiar with Dakota College already from when I was an assistant in Wahpeton.

“I visited here once a year when I was working at Science, and it’s a place a lot of people I had come to know like (Bismarck State head women’s basketball coach) Jason Harris and Jeff Ralph from Wahpeton High School have always talked really highly about, and I knew how good a position there would be.

“As it turned out, this opening came up and I knew I’d be a good fit, and thankfully it’s worked out.”

NDSCS has a similar setup at the top of its athletic administration tree to what DCB recently decided to set up. Scott Schumacher, the Wildcats’ former head men’s basketball coach when the school employed Colvin, was also the school’s athletic director.

Schumacher has since moved on from Wahpeton. He most recently finished his third academic year as the athletic director and head men’s basketball coach at Blinn College in Brenham, Texas.

Colvin will be wearing the AD’s hat for the very first time at DCB. However, he said it was his former boss at NDSCS that inspired Colvin and showed how both jobs can be handled simultaneously.

“My inspiration to aspire to this sort of came my old boss over at Science,” Colvin said. “He’s Wahpeton’s AD and men’s basketball coach, and it was through working with him and observing what he did that I thought it would be nice to have both of those roles for my own somewhere."

Colvin is quickly getting a good sense of both the proverbial and literal lay of the DCB land.

He started out life in Bottineau by staying at Mead Hall on the school’s campus while looking for more permanent housing.
That’s made it easy for him to get a sense of what the school is like, or at least what it’s like during the summer months. Colvin sought out Schumacher to see how best to juggle both of his new jobs, and he said he is looking forward to also getting advice from Johnson.

“I’ve been picking (Schumacher’s) brains about it a lot,” Colvin said. “He’s always been a big help in terms of giving me a really good idea of how to make having both of these jobs work. I’m also looking forward to chatting with Scott Johnson here at DCB a little bit to see how he’s been doing some things with the athletic department.”

As far as the DCB men’s basketball program is concerned, Colvin doesn’t see himself shaking things up too much compared to how the Lumberjacks operated under Fehringer.

“It will be very similar to what Cory had been doing here,” Colvin said. “What we want to do on the court is get up and down quickly, apply a lot of pressure on whoever we’re playing and get some nice quick buckets.

“Our fans coming out to the games shouldn’t expect a big difference to what was here before in terms of our style of play. I think that’ll be a welcome thing from the fans’ perspective, but it’s also important to us inside the program, too, because you should build on success instead of just starting over.”

Colvin will be overseeing seven programs in all at DCB. The school fields baseball, men’s and women’s basketball, football, men’s hockey, softball and women’s volleyball teams.

With the first of the school’s three sports seasons just around the corner now, Colvin is excited to get started in earnest.

“I feel lucky to be getting started here at such a highly thought-of college,” he said. “I’m counting down the seconds until we’re able to get going.”